Browsing by Subject "McDowell, John Henry -- Criticism and interpretation"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Fallibility, Skepticism, and Distance in John McDowell's "Mind and World"
    (2009) Weiss, Zachary; Macbeth, Danielle; Dostal, Robert J.
    For my thesis, I looked at skepticism in terms of John McDowell's philosophy in Mind and World. In this work, McDowell explains how concepts mediate the relation between our minds and the world. He does so by making use of Kant's distinction in The Critique of Pure Reason between sensibility, our receptive capacity, and understanding, our spontaneous capacity. McDowell argues, similarly to Kant, that sensibility and understanding must be mutually implicated in any cognitive activity; theories of mind that try to explain thought by separating the contributions of sensibility and understanding are, he contends, incoherent. On these grounds, he refutes Davidson's Coherentism and what McDowell calls the Myth of the Given. As such, we will begin by rehearsing McDowell's claims refuting the Myth of the Given and Coherentism, and see how that brings him to assert that "we need a conception of experiences as states or occurrences that are passive but reflect conceptual capacities, capacities that belong to spontaneity, in operation" (McDowell 23). This will lead into his address (or lack thereof) of skepticism, upon which we will look again at The Critique of Pure Reason, utilizing Kant's idea of an intellectual intuition as a foil to McDowell's philosophy. In doing so, we will come to a richer understanding of McDowell's standpoint with regards to skepticism as well as his philosophy as a whole. This richer understanding will be furthered by addressing Charles Larmore's objection to some of McDowell's language, after which we can come to a more thorough understanding of the process of knowing the world.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Ghostless Cartesianism: Reintegrating the Fractured Self-Consciousness in Action
    (2009) Kopilow, Emily; Macbeth, Danielle; Yurdin, Joel
    In a series of exchanges Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell take turns accusing each other of succumbing to dualistic theories of action founded in the subtle draws of a Cartesian dualism. The question of the meaning of mindedness, and the extent to which our conceptual capacities extend and are actualized, is the essential question framing what Hubert Dreyfus terms "the battle of the myths" between John McDowell and himself. The paper begins with Dreyfus's phenomenological claim that immersed bodily coping is nonconceptual, nonlinguistic, nonrational, and unminded. The second section supplements McDowell's reply in the exchange, primarily using Mind and World and a series of unpublished lectures. Through McDowell we come to see not only how intentional action cannot be unrational or nonconceptual, he shows us a way to understand how it can be rational and conceptual. The third section introduces what I term 'intellectual activity' as a form of immersed coping that further make Dreyfus's concerns seem unfounded.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item